Lately however, Getresponse’s attribute set has evolved quite a bit, to the point at which it is becoming more of an’all-in-one’ marketing alternative.

In addition to email advertising, it also supplies training hosting, landing pages, and some CRM (client relationship management) performance.

We’ll discuss all these attributes in depth below, but first, let us look at pricing.

Main Features

Getresponse’s feature set is arguably one of the most comprehensive out there.

Not only does this provide all of the key stuff you would expect from an email marketing platform – record templates, hosting, autoresponders, analytics and so forth, but as mentioned above, it has recently been expanding the feature set to the point at which it is morphing into an all-in-one / CRM-style marketing platform.

The question is if Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of not – let’s drill down to the crucial features to find out.

Customer Support

Up until quite recently Getresponse support was one of the most comprehensive available for email marketing tools: the firm offered phone service alongside live chat support, email service and various online tutorials / resources.

Sadly, the telephone support has now been discontinued. Instead you’ll have to use live chat (24/7) or email support. To be fair, many similar e-marketing platform providers only offer both of these stations – if phone support is a deal-breaker for you you might want to consider Aweber, which nonetheless provides it (you can read our Aweber review here).

Concerning the caliber of Getresponse support, I have never needed to use it quite frequently (a fantastic thing) but once I have I’ve discovered it to be a small mixed bag (less of a good thing). Some of those live chat support I have received has been excellent, and I haven’t needed to wait too much time to talk to a broker; the email service less so.

Some of the comments I’ve got from our readers will indicate that there do have to be improvements made in terms of the quality of service Getresponse offer. Much like a lot of these types of companies, I anticipate it boils down to who you get on the day. Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Analytics

Getresponse provides some very comprehensive reporting and analytics options. You get all the Fundamentals of track – open speed, click-through, unsubscribe Prices and so on – but in addition to that there are some very nifty features that are worth a particular mention, specifically:

‘one-click segmentation’: the choice to spot individuals who didn’t participate with an e-newsletter you sent and set them in a section of readers that you can then email again with a different variant of the e-newsletter

‘metrics over time’: you can discover just when a lot of your subscribers take action in your emails, and time your prospective mailouts according to this info

’email ROI’: by incorporating some tracking code into your post-sales page on your site, you can find out how efficiently (or not!) Your email campaigns are driving earnings, and work out your return on investment in electronic mail marketing.

Per-user info – you can click one of your subscribers and see where they signed up from, where they are located and which emails they’ve opened previously.

Mailchimp and Aweber provide some similar reporting functionality (especially around sales monitoring ) however Getresponse’s reporting tool is definitely one of most featured on the market (it certainly trounces the stats options provided by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

Templates

Thus far so good with Getresponse, however, in regards to templates, Getresponse arguably drops down a little.

Unfortunately, the templates supplied out of the box seem somewhat dated; they are not as attractive as those provided by Mailchimp or even Campaign Monitor (and I marginally prefer Aweber’s offering here also ).

On the other hand, the templates are extremely tweakable – you can change fonts, layouts and vision easily enough with all the controls provided; and of course there’s nothing to prevent you simply designing your own HTML email template and minding the code for this.

Furthermore, you will find a lot of templates to choose from — around 500 — and they’re presented in easy-to-understand classes, so it’s generally pretty simple to find a good beginning point to get a template and then edit it until you are happy with the plan.

If you are really unhappy with the templates provided by Getresponse, there’s also the option of purchasing a template by a third party supplier such as Theme Forest.

Another thing worth pointing out regarding Getresponse’s templates is that the assortment of RSS-to-email applications options aren’t very extensive (just 11 templates are provided – well short of their 700+ accessible for regular newsletters!) And some of them played a bit for me when I tested them (2010). I eventually found something that worked for me personally, but I think there are definitely a few improvements which could be created in this area. Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters which are delivered to your subscribers at intervals determined by you — you can put them up so that immediately after somebody signs up to your mailing list, they receive a welcome message from the business; a week later they can get a discount deal for some of your products or services; three weeks after they could obtain an encouragement to accompany you on social networking. And so on.

Getresponse’s autoresponder functionality is a key selling point – it offers one of the most comprehensive feature sets available.

You can send either time-based or action-based messages; time-based options include cycles like the example above, and also action-based messages may be triggered by user actions or advice, such as:

Unlocks

clicks

subscriptions to particular lists

changes connected tastes

finished transactions / targets

birthdays

changes in user data

Recently Getresponse launched a brand new version of the new autoresponder functionality, called’Marketing Automation.’

This allows you to make automation workflows using a drag and drop builder – you basically set up an’automation flowchart’ that instructs Getresponse what to do if a user opens a specific deal, clicks on a certain link etc..

This kind of performance goes far beyond what’s traditionally been available from autoresponders, and lets you create an individual travel that may be customised to the nth level.

To get a fast overview I would suggest taking a look in Getresponse’s video review for Marketing Automation.

It’s important to note, however, that these more advanced marketing automation features are only available to the more expensive programs – the’Pro’ program and upward. Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Landing page Builder

Online advertising campaigns that make use of landing pages will usually generate far more leads in the event, rather than simply directing individuals to some (cluttered!) Website, they tip users to appealing’squeeze pages’ comprising clear info and a clean, well-designed data capture type.

Getresponse offers something very beneficial in this regard that most of its rivals don’t: a landing page founder (and one that’s mobile-friendly to boot).

Products such as Campaign Monitor and Aweber ask you to use a third party (and paid-for) landing page generating tool like Unbounce or Instapage; Mailchimp lately introduced a landing page performance but it’s yet to become as sophisticated at Getresponse’s.

But unless you’re on a Getresponse’Guru’,’Max’ or’Enterprise’ plan, the Getresponse landing page performance is fairly limited: you can just create one landing page, that could only be displayed 1,000 times per month.

Additionally, and very importantly, you can’t use the landing page A/B testing functionality on the least expensive Getresponse program (whereby the system indicates a sample of your customers different versions of your landing page, computes conversion rates, and ultimately rolls out the best performing landing page automatically).

You may buy the Landing Pages feature as an add-on for an extra $15 per month, however very frustratingly, although the add-on permits you to show an infinite amount of landing pages to potential subscribers, it does not include A/B testing.

Therefore, if I had been considering the Getresponse landing page functionality, I wouldn’t bother with this rather half-baked add-on: I’d just go for one of the more expensive plans (which I guess is what Getresponse want one to do!) .

Mobile-Responsive Design

Getresponse was ahead of its competitors for quite a while using its responsive email design functionality, which automatically adjusts your e-newsletter’s template so that if a user is reading it onto a mobile device, the layout and fonts will be optimized for the device in question.

Most competing products have caught up on this now, and extend responsive email templates, but Getresponse is far better than many similar goods as soon as it comes to displaying a responsive record of your e-newsletter – you just hit on a’mobile preview’ button to get an instant snapshot of your email resembles on a smartphone (see picture right).

Not only that but you can’flip’ the smartphone preview around, so that you may preview what your own email looks like when the display is employed in either portrait or landscape style. Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Customer Relationship Management

One of the most frustrating facets of using many famous CRM tools is the need to export data to CSV and straight back to your email marketing instrument as a way to perform mailouts (or the necessity to export data from the email marketing tool into your CRM to include leads to it).

So when I saw Getresponse lately introducing a new CRM attribute into their plans I had been intrigued – this could possibly eliminate all that data exporting and importing, and keep everything neatly in one area.

Initially I was not that impressed with all the Getresponse CRM tool since you could only use it in order to carry out rather basic tasks: you could create sales pipelines, add contacts to them and track activity (emails, telephone calls etc.) with those contacts manually.

But lately Getresponse have upped their game somewhat on this front. The CRM is currently integrated with all of Getresponse’s email marketing functionality and you can add users into a CRM pipeline based on their action (form completions, email opens, purchases etc.) or activate autoresponders based on the accession of a new contact to a pipeline phase.

An example of how you could use this functionality would be as follows:

You can add a contact to a specific stage on a revenue pipeline depending on the page of your website they completed a form ;

you could then send a automated email tailored to that pipeline stage a couple of days afterwards;

and based on the actions they took in regards to that email (clicking on a certain link etc) you can automatically move them on another stage of the pipeline and automatically invite them to a webinar.

It is very smart stuff, and I can’t think of any similar email marketing product offering this kind of tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this kind of functionality you normally must look at committed — and more expensive — CRM products such as Salesforce and Infusionsoft.

However, it is not all fantastic news about the CRM front there are a few big things missing out of Getresponse’s CRM attribute set.

The most glaring omission is e mail activity monitoring. Other CRM packages permit you to bcc a dropbox email address any time you send an email to some lead or customer; doing so keeps a record of the communication from the contact’s history. There’s now no method of doing this with all the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an simple way to send one-to-one mails to leads or customers.

And oddly, if you click a contact in a deal pipeline, you can’t see their contact action — i.e., the activities they have taken (open, clicks etc.) in regards to previous communications that you have delivered to your leads are not displayed. To observe this, you need to go from the CRM part of Getresponse, hunt for your contact in the contacts section and then click on their details. But guess what? Doing so does not exhibit their deal history.

Task management is non-existent also: unlike committed CRM tools, there is no way to assign tasks to other team members.

Eventually, adding contacts to your pipeline stage is difficult. You need to add contacts to a list first, then visit the CRM pipeline, add a bargain and hunt your lists for the contact you just added. From a usability standpoint this is very clunky and time consuming. You should just have the ability to add a bargain directly to a pipeline and enter the contact details of your guide or customer at the point.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is a bit half-baked. However, it’s a new feature and the stuff it could perform on the automation aspect is remarkable. I am optimistic that this feature gets developed over time because done right, it is potentially a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

Webcasts

Getresponse recently introduced the capability to sponsor webinars on the platform.

Given that webinars are generally utilized as a lead-generation strategy, the idea of having your email database along with your webinar tool under the exact same roof is very appealing.

The pricing is also very aggressive also by comparison to based webinar solutions. For example, one of the leading webinar providers, Gotowebinar, charges $199 per month to host webinars with as much as 500 attendees; you can actually do the same (plus a great deal more) with Getresponse for $165 (so long as your listing size is below 25,000).

With respect to attendee limitations, the Getresponse’Guru’ program allows you to sponsor a webinar with up to 100 participants; the’Max’ program’s limit is 500.

You might also purchase webinars performance as an add-on to a cheaper plan: $40 per month buys you a 100 attendees limitation, $99 a month buys you a 500 attendees restrict. It isn’t clear what your choices are if you need to host larger scale webinars than that however.

A couple of Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being especially useful are:

The very fact that your attendees don’t need to install any software to attend the webinars

one-click record of your webinars

screensharing performance

free online storage for playback documents

Ultimately webinar functionality is potentially an extremely helpful feature to have sitting in your e-marketing arsenal and its addition as a feature provides Getresponse a very significant edge over its key rivals, especially once you consider that you can connect it in using a built-in CRM tool (more about that in a minute ). Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Email Deliverability

The email deliverability rate – the proportion of e-newsletters delivered that successfully reach inboxes – is always an important point to check at when selecting an email marketing instrument.

Not all email marketing suppliers are that forthright in their deliverability prices; however, Getresponse seems reasonably open about that, with this to say about it on their own website:

At GetResponse we’re frequently asked about the quality of our deliverability rate. Since deliverability is dependent upon many factors, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for each mailing. For all our customers collectively, nevertheless, we are proud to say our overall deliverability rate currently stands at 99%.

Clearly you’re going to have to choose the organization’s word for this, but assuming it’s true, it is a fantastic rate and inspires confidence that the huge majority of emails you send using Getresponse will achieve their intended recipients.

What’s more, Getresponse really provides you the deliverability rate of every message in your email analytics – this is something that I haven’t encountered on competing goods’ metrics. A thumbs up for this.

I do need to pull Getresponse up on something concerning deliverability nevertheless: to guarantee a high deliverability rate, it’s advisable to use a platform named DKIM email authentication. You are able to use DKIM using Getresponse – but just on the more expensive Getresponse’Max’ programs.

Although I’ve not struck any deliverability difficulties using the cheaper plans, competing products don’t make you invest in a more expensive plan to avail of the feature — it would be good to see Getresponse being more generous here.

Email Opt-in

There are two methods you can employ to add subscribers to a mailing list: having a’single opt-in’ or a’double click’ process.

If you utilize one opt-in process, the person registering to your own mailing list is added to a mailing list the minute they hit the submit button on your sign up form.

Using a double opt-in process, the individual signing up to your list is sent an email containing a confirmation link that s/he have to click before being subscribed.

The main advantage of a single opt-in process is that it makes it really easy for users to sign up for your mailing list; it also generally increases conversion speed and so the amount of subscribers on your list. A dual opt-in procedure is best for verifying that the folks subscribing to a list are using real email addresses and contributes to cleaner information and more precise stats (because receptive rates etc. ) are calculated based on a list comprising only email addresses).

Now, the fantastic news is that Getresponse allows you to make use of either opt-in approach – this isn’t the case with all competing products. Thus a thumbs up for Getresponse to be flexible on this.

Collecting Data

There are two methods to use types in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form that you design yourself, or you can design your form in Getresponse (choosing from a decent range of templates and tweaking them to match your website design). If you go for the latter path, you can add the form to your site using a snippet of code that runs some Javascript to display your form — that may be shown in a variety of different formats (for example inline, pop-up or slide-up).

You are probably thinking that this sounds quite good — but to be honest, I think there’s a lot of room for advancement with respect to Getresponse form templates.

For a start, they’re not responsive (i.e., they won’t resize themselves automatically to suit the device they’re being viewed on).

Furthermore, no controls are provided by Getresponse to switch forms on or off on specific devices or pages of your website. At the light of Google’s brand new approach to pop-ups (where sites can have a hit in search results if they display’intrusive interstitials’ on cellular devices) this really is a bit of a concern.

To get around this, I generally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do using HTML embeded forms that I design myself, and for popups I link my Getresponse to a growth-hacking tool named Sumo (this allows me to switch pop-ups off for cellular users, in addition to display forms exactly as I’d love to and onto the pages I want). Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

UI Expertise

On the whole, Getresponse is really simple to use. It’s certainly easy enough to do all of the basics: import contacts, create campaigns, set up autoresponders and check numbers and the interface is pretty clean and intuitive.

With regards to how it stacks up against its rivals in this respect, I’d argue that Campaign Monitor is a tiny bit more user friendly, and Mailchimp has a slicker user interface (although one which makes locating certain performance a little bit tricky at times).

1 area I feel that might be significantly better in the user-friendliness point of view is the Getresponse e-newsletter editor.

Whilst its drag-and-drop approach does in theory provide a very flexible way to create blocks of content and move them around an e-newsletter, in practice it’s fairly clunky to use and can cause accidental deletion of content, or positioning of it at the wrong portion of the e-newsletter.

If you’re able to get your head around it, and practice using it a little bit, it will result in a helpful tool – it is just that the execution of it could be rather better.

Also, as described above, the CRM tool might be far better from a usability point of view — adding contacts to deals could be difficult.

Free Trial

This helps you avoid that annoying”oops I forgot I signed up for that trial and today I’m getting charged for a commodity I do not use” scenario.

The only down side to this free trial is that it limits the number of readers it is possible to send to 1000. It would be useful if this could be raised a bit, as it might help prospective users try the tool out in more’real-world’ situations.

Pricing

There are three chief sorts of Getresponse pricing plan -‘Email’,’Pro’ and’Max’ — and within each of them, many additional kinds of strategy to pick from (all based on list size).

Additionally there is an”Enterprise” plan for users that our lists exceed 100,000 email addresses: this starts at $1199, with accurate pricing depending on prerequisites (if you’re considering the”Enterprise” plan, you will need to contact Getresponse to schedule a presentation, outline your needs and discuss pricing).

Significant discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 months of support (18% and 30% respectively) — those are much more generous than many competing platforms. Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Distinctions of Every Strategy

All the Getresponse plans cover the significant fundamentals — key features include:

The ability to import, develop and host an email database

a wide range of templates

autoresponder functionality

responsive email designs

split testing

in-depth reporting

RSS / blog to-email performance

comprehensive segmentation options

societal sharing tools

There are a number of differences between the’Email’,’Guru’ and’Max’ programs but for me the main ones are:

Landing pages – you can simply avail of all landing pages which allow split testing and unlimited views if you are on a’Pro’ plan or greater

Webinars – that performance is not available whatsoever around the’Email’ strategy and the number of webinar attendees is restricted for the’Guru’ and’Max’ programs at 100, 500 respectively (it’s unclear what the limit is about the’Enterprise’ plan).

Users – you can have just one user account on the’Email’ plan; by comparison you receive 3 on’Guru’, 5 on’Max’ and 10 on’Enterprise’.

Pricing Vs Competitors

Provided that you’re pleased to use one of the entry-level’Email’ plans, the pay-per-month Getresponse plans are on the whole cheaper than those provided by many of its key competitors, particularly if you’ve got a fairly high number of email addresses on your own database.

For example, if you’ve got a mailing list containing between 9,000 and 10,000 documents which you want to send an unlimited number of mails per month to, then you’ll discover that hosting it using Getresponse prices $65 monthly.

That is:

$4 a month cheaper than with Aweber

$10 cheaper per month than Mailchimp

$84 per month cheaper than Campaign Monitor*

Decision Campaign Monitor’s pricing structure depends not just the number of email addresses on your database but on the number of emails you send a month also. If you’re happy to set a limit on the number of emails delivered via Campaign Monitor (in the case above, to 50k emails), you can expect to pay a monthly charge of $89, still substantially greater than Getresponse’s.

The sole well-known service that I can think of that comes in significantly cheaper is Mad Mimi, which charges $42 per month to sponsor up to 10,000 email addresses (note however that the performance offered by Mad Mimi is nowhere near as extensive as Getresponse’s or really another products mentioned above).

Additionally, it is worth pointing out that Mailchimp offers thinner pricing rings, meaning that based on the size of your listing, it may sometimes be a slightly cheaper option than Getresponse.

In the database end of things, Getresponse’s pricing is really competitive too – you can host a database comprising 1,000 email addresses for $15 per month using Getresponse, compared to $29 with Aweber; $59 on Campaign Monitor (infinite send).

Mailchimp’s monthly fee to get a 1,000 record database is the like Getresponse’s; and Mad Mimi supplies a slightly more affordable, if much less operational offering for $12 a month.

Two final things to be aware of about the pricing :

Some competing suppliers — notably Mailchimp – offer completely free account for users with a few documents (but these do not offer the entire range of features that you get on a paid program ).

As stated earlier, if you’re prepared to pay upfront for 1 or 2 years, you can avail of substantial discounts that the other competitors do not yet provide.

So the bottom line is that Getresponse is pretty competitive in the pricing department. But what about attributes? Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden

Conclusion

Getresponse represents among the more cost-effective tactics to host and communicate with an email database.

It’s also one of the most intriguing products of its kind – because it provides email marketing, landing pages, CRM and webinars all under one roof. It is hard to consider any rival product that delivers this’all around’ proposal, and it is what proceeds to persuade us to utilize it to Style Factory’s email marketing.

Some improvements to Getresponse do have to be made nonetheless, especially where the email programmer is concerned – its drag and drop interface is much more fiddly and less responsive than it ought to be. A lot of improvements can be made to the data capture types too, especially for users wanting to display them on mobile devices.

And from what I gather from reader opinions, there are improvements that could be made into the support offering.

All in all though I speed Getresponse very tremendously – you receive considerable bang for your buck with this item.

Listed below are a few pros and cons of using Getresponse overall:

Advantages of Getresponse

Provided that you’re happy to utilize an’Email’ plan, Getresponse is more affordable than most of its key competitors (in certain cases, significantly so) whilst offering just as much, or even more functionality as them.

The reductions you get when paying for a couple of years of service are extremely generous – you will be hard pushed to find comparable reductions in prices from key opponents.

Its webinar functionality is a USP – something which is not offered by any similar products.

Its own reporting and thorough split testing features are strong.

Getresponse is clear regarding deliverability rates, publishing characters on its own website and providing deliverability statistics for individual e-newsletters you send.

It offers a very flexible approach to information segmentation – more elastic than many competing products.

It allows you to add subscribers to a mailing list on either a single-opt in and a double opt-in basis.

It sends emails that are reactive and permits you to preview smartphone variations of your e-newsletters really easily.

It comes with a helpful landing page founder – but bear in mind that you have to be on a more expensive plan to get the fully functional version of this.

You can test all its features free for 30 days without needing to input credit card details.

Disadvantages of Getresponse

The drag and drop interface for designing mails can be a little bit on the side.

The information capture forms provided are not responsive and you can’t control when and where they are displayed on your website.

CRM performance has to be improved considerably before it can be thought of as a replacement for a standalone CRM product.

There is a limited selection of RSS-to-HTML e-newsletter templates supplied.

You can only use’web-safe’ fonts from e-newsletters, which can make the templates look slightly less slick than those provided by competing products.

The pricing arrangement is a little perplexing, with customers having to cover something of a premium to access the landing page creator tool.

The free trial limits the number of subscribers you can send messages into 1000.

The landing page addition doesn’t allow you to perform A/B evaluations, meaning that so as to obtain this functionality you’re forced to use a more expensive program than you may like.

DKIM authentication is only on the more expensive’Max’ plans.

No telephone service is provided. Httpwebrequest Getresponse 403 Forbidden